Minimally invasive surgery (MIS or laparoscopic surgery) is a modern surgical technique that may require small incisions or sometimes may be performed with no incisions at all. MIS may be performed with an endoscope and/or several other long, thin surgical instruments. Accordingly, some drawbacks that may be associated with large incisions—for example, operative blood loss and post-operative pain—may be limited and recovery time may be shorter compared to traditional open surgery. Despite these advantages, MIS may be more challenging than conventional surgery because of various limitations associated with performing MIS techniques. For example, laparoscopic surgeons may be required to successfully perform surgery procedures despite potentially having restricted vision, hand-eye coordination problems, limited working space, and lack of tactile sensation, among other impediments. Accordingly, MIS may be a more difficult skill for medical students and residents to master.
Simulations with computerized surgical training systems may offer an opportunity to teach and practice surgical skills, such as MIS, outside the operating room before using such skills when performing surgeries on living patients. Known as “transfer of learning,” (the application of skills and knowledge gained in one context being applied in another context), technical skills acquired, for example, on low-fidelity simulators may be transferred to improve performance on higher fidelity models such as live animals, cadavers and, eventually live human patients.
Transfer of learning may be applied in surgical procedures by abstracting the essential construct of the surgical procedure (i.e., task) in developed models that may allow trainees to perform the abstract tasks. When the right abstract tasks are selected for training, the trainee may learn to ignore the physical limitations of the training platform, thereby learning techniques that may be used while performing surgical procedures.